We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC204: Stablecoins vs Bitcoin w/ Allen Farrington (Bitcoin Podcast)
Episode Date: October 16, 2024In this episode, Allen shares his thoughts on the Saifedean vs. Saylor debate on borrowing against Bitcoin, the role of stablecoins in expanding fiat, and their underlying protocols. He also delves in...to the risks of stablecoins compared to traditional bank accounts and highlights current technical risks in the crypto space. Allen gives his take on free speech and technologies like Nostr and discusses the growing custody and derivatives activity with institutions like BNY Mellon and IBIT. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 01:26 - Allen’s perspective on the Saifedean vs. Saylor debate regarding borrowing against Bitcoin. 05:55 - Why stablecoins may or may not be more risky than traditional bank accounts. 10:26 - How stablecoins might help in the expansion of fiat currencies globally. 14:46 - Technical risks that Allen is currently concerned about in the crypto space. 27:19 - Whether stablecoins require protocols like Tron or Solana for long-term functionality. 31:51 How institutional involvement is changing the crypto landscape, from custody to derivatives. 39:48 - Allen’s views on free speech, Nostr, and supporting technologies for Bitcoin. 45:48 - The significance of BNY Mellon’s custody services and the approval of derivatives for Bitcoin. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Allen's (X) Twitter Account. Allen on Nostr. Allen’s book: Bitcoin Is Venice: Essays on the Past and Future of Capitalism. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Check out our Bitcoin Fundamentals Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Bluehost Fintool PrizePicks Vanta Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise TurboTax HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Spotify! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
Transcript
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You're listening to TIP.
Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast.
On today's show, I have the thoughtful Alan Farrington.
Alan is the author of one of my favorite books in the Bitcoin space called Bitcoin is Venice.
He's a very deep thinker in someone's opinion that I greatly respect.
He's the founder of Axiom BTC Capital, and during today's conversation, we cover a wide-ranging
amount of topics, but most of the conversation centers around stable coins and how it impacts
Bitcoin, how they're evolving and what the future might hold for traditional banks as they continue
to participate in this market moving forward. I have no doubt this conversation will help you
think deeper about the space. So without further delay, here's my chat with Alan.
Celebrating 10 years, you are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network.
Now for your host, Preston Pish.
Hey, everyone, welcome to the show. I'm here with the one, the only. He's back again.
Alan Farrington, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Preston.
Hey, man.
So, you know, we catch up from time to time, but it always seems like it's rapid fire.
We've got two minutes to say hello and then not really have a real conversation.
I think Nashville was like that, right?
That's probably the last time I saw you in person.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
And I love chatting with you, Alan.
So this is great.
Here's where I want to start.
So Safedin and Sailor had quite.
I just, full disclosure, I haven't seen it.
I've only seen...
In case you want to probe to or listen to it, I guess.
I've seen clips of it, which I think you know.
Yeah.
Which I'm totally open to the idea that they have been taken out of context, but that's
life.
That's Bitcoin Twitter for you.
That was the thing that day that everyone got mad about.
So here we are.
Well, where I want to go with it is it seems like Michael's looking at it and saying,
hey, I think you can trust the big banks.
And I think that, you know, if you want to use Bitcoin as,
What's the word I'm looking for? Pristine collateral. You should be able to borrow against it. And I
never want to sell any of my Bitcoin. And if these big banks want to go out there and make yield on it,
I even saw Caitlin Long had some comments about doing this in an appropriate and safe kind of way,
if you're going to do it. And then safe is just kind of, and maybe I'm taking his comments out of
context here because I've only seen some of the clips as well. I haven't watched the whole thing.
But it seems like safe is like, no, this is just garbage.
I think everything's going to be a Celsius blockfi kind of debacle.
Anytime you do borrowing and lending on top of Bitcoin,
I'm curious, how does Alan Farrington see this?
So, okay, there's a bunch of different threads I could pick up on seriously,
like in attempting to actually discuss this, you know,
not in the trolley way that I did on Twitter.
I mean, if anyone's confused by that, though,
then it's their fault for following me in the first place.
Like, I don't ever say anything serious on Twitter.
That was just a really, that was the thing that day.
That's what I mentioned before, right?
Like, everyone was piling on.
I just thought it was funny.
I'll throw out a couple of things, and then you can tell me which one you think is most interesting.
So the idea of boring against Bitcoin, like how that's likely to develop, how you'll
be able to, how you get yield on it.
I guess maybe the spiciest one, which hopefully isn't relying on having taken Sailor's
comments out of context, but I think is like pushing it a bit further or like probing a bit further,
whether you want to do that at all and if it's maybe to what extent it's defeating the purpose of
why Bitcoin is good money and hence why it has any value in the first place and hence why anyone
should care about it, including him and sort of how he's ended up in this position of talking about
it in this way. That's maybe a bit more philosophical I guess but that is worth being clear on
for sure. And then I guess Steel Manning's safe position which is now very theoretical about
post hyper-bitconization, like on a Bitcoin standard, will this exist?
And from what I could tell, again, I've not listened to it.
You just said you haven't either.
So this also may not even be accurate.
This may be out of context even while trying to be charitable.
My impression of why they seemed to disagree so vehemently was that Safe was implicitly
talking about 50 plus years away or whenever we're at post-type of Bitcoinization.
And Saylor was maybe more talking about how you play the process of money.
monetization and like what to do in the meantime.
They're maybe talking past each other a little bit.
But Steel Manning's safe, well, it's not even really steel manning because I agree with it.
But, you know, making the case as strongly as possible as to, even if Sailor's right,
that there is a way to game this to kind of arbitrage the monetization process,
why that will eventually go away and why a lot of Bitcoiners reacting to it,
including me sarcastically, are just like completely, you know,
have this sort of repulsion almost to like the idea of risk-free yield.
So, yeah, exploring that. So I don't know, which are those signs the most fun?
Yeah, let's talk about the second one there, about just the idea of risk-free yield,
because, and for people that don't say it without laughing.
If people don't follow Alan.
People don't follow Alan.
His sense of humor is the top of Bitcoin Twitter, in my humble opinion.
I do pride myself on my posting.
I will say there's a lot of things that I'm, that's the thing I'm best at, basically.
Like, that's where I think I genuinely do rank amongst the elite.
Yes, yes, this is for sure.
All right.
Talk us through risk, quote unquote, Raul Powell, risk-free yield.
Yeah, well, so SAFE's point in either hyper-Bitonized world on a Bitcoin standard or just on a sound money standard.
So kind of having stripped out fiat by whatever means you think, you know, whether it's purely in theory or as we all hope is likely going to happen with Bitcoin, just who knows how long away.
His point is that it's almost more easily understood in the negative, I guess, because this is like a weird aberration of Fiat, that this idea that you can even have a risk-free rate at all, even as a concept, never mind as something that's like intermediated by a commercial bank.
The idea of a risk-free rate is kind of obviously nonsense, because in order to get any kind of return, any kind of yield on an investment, you have to take risk.
I mean, it almost seems so obvious that it's like weird you need to explain this, but you do in Fiat because,
There is in fiat, such a thing is the risk-free rate.
And it can only exist because of basically money printing.
I mean, we can go into a bit more detail, like what the exact mechanics of that are.
But if anything, I'd probably rather not other than alluding to the fact that it's very technical and complicated.
I think in large part to confuse people and to stop them probing too hard as to what's happening.
Like just calling it money printing is basically fine, right?
The bulk, if not the entirety, probably of the 5% in that example that Saylor wants to get from JP Morgan.
is ultimately coming from riskless money printing, and hence that's how you arrive at it being
risk-free in the first place, that to the people doing it, they're just stealing purchasing power
from all other savers, and it's not risky to them, hence they can pass it on and have it not
be risky to the holder of the instrument receiving the yield in the first place. So you strip all
of this away because it relies on ultimately central banks being able to print isn't even the right,
but create reserves.
That's what's propping all of this up, no matter how complicated the mechanics are in between.
And obviously, you don't have that on Bitcoin because nobody can print more Bitcoin.
So, you know, you mentioned before, it's like you have a Celsius or a blockfire or whatever.
They go bust.
There's no central bank of Bitcoin to recapitalize them.
Like, they actually go bust.
And the logic you would think is that at least, maybe not like, it's kind of obviously
disproven by those examples.
But once this has been normalized, right?
So again, post-hyper-rererererequinization, people just don't do this in the first place.
because one, it's too risky to try it as a business, but there probably isn't even an
opportunity because every one of the, like, there's no marks anymore for this scam, basically,
because everyone's aware of how stupid it is, so nobody indulges in it in the first place.
And I think from Michael's perspective, probably taking words out of his mouth,
based on the model that he provided showing these different prices in Nashville,
he thinks that this is multi-decade process that is underway, which allows,
this opportunity to arbitrage this Fiat debacle for many years.
I think it's probably right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think you were right in the way that you characterized it, that safe, I think,
is talking.
We're already hyper-bitcoin-ized, and a Fiat doesn't really even exist at this point.
So, like, what in the world are you talking about?
Maybe they're talking past each other.
I'm not sure.
But let's assume that a person does want to borrow against their Bitcoin.
And we're, you know, two years from now, you know, we're still in this.
thing that's materializing, which is a hyper-bitonized world, the reason I have always,
I'll tell you my perspective, and I'm kind of curious if you agree with this, and if,
if you are going to borrow against your Bitcoin, I think first of all, it has to be in some
type of peer-to-peer kind of way that's over-collateralized for it to reduce risk.
There's no way for it to be riskless, but to reduce risk, it needs to be peer-to-peer.
It needs to be over-collateralized.
The other thing that I think is a really important highlight is the Kelly Criterion.
So when you're looking at- Oh, interesting. I never thought about that in this context, but yeah, go on.
So when I'm looking at sizing and I'm saying, okay, Bitcoin, you know, let's just say it's returning 25, 50% annualized.
And then I'm looking at like how much I could make by, let's say, I'm lending out my Bitcoin to get dollars and whatnot.
But that yield that I'm collecting, let's say it's 10%. When you use the ticket,
Kelly Criterion and you're saying, okay, I can get this, call it 50% return by just holding the
Bitcoin, or I can make a 60% return by lending it out with this additional 10% kicker.
And then obviously your net worth actually is a variable inside the Kelly criterion.
When you do this and you use really rough, rudimentary numbers, what you find is that
your position size should be pretty small.
It shouldn't be big.
Interesting.
It should be.
I got to buy that.
I need to doodle it to convince myself.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's.
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The math suggests that a person should not be taking their entire position size
and putting it into this trade because of the enhanced risk
and the minimal return kicker that's added to it.
So those are the two things that I'm looking at is if I'm going to do this. First of all,
what is the least risky way to do it? And then, and we're not even talking about stable
coins and like how you basically do this from an application standpoint and the risks that are
associated with the whole stable coin and what protocols they're operating on and all this other
stuff. But then just the sheer sizing should be, in my opinion, pretty small relative to your
overall Bitcoin position. I'm curious what you think about.
that. What else needs to be included in this framework? I think I thought maybe two or three things.
I might, I might just forget us for going through. Any of these are interesting. You want to
go further on them, just interrupt or let me know at the end when I've run out of ideas. I think
the most important thing to be clear on is how do I put this? Something like from whose perspective
are we looking for yield in the first place? So the idea of an over collateralized Bitcoin back loan
is it's the provider that I guess the lender, but the provider of Fiat, who,
who is assuming the essentially riskless position.
On the assumption, and this is a separate point to come to, actually,
but on the assumption that Bitcoin is the best collateral for this loan,
because it's basically the most liquid, even some qualifiers there, I guess,
but it's certainly one of the most liquid assets in the world.
The most relevant way in which is liquid is that you can't always liquidate it, right?
So the market for it is never closed.
There's always a price.
And it's certainly liquid enough that for any, you know,
sub $100 million or whatever position, you will be able to liquidate it right away and you'll get
the price that you want. And that's relevant to the risk calculus there. Even that's kind of interesting
from, I don't know if Saylor meant this or if they talked about it in a part of the conversation I didn't
hear, but that also can only work because you can print Fiat. Like, it's ultimately just downstream
of Fiat being printed endlessly and you're, you really are just arbitraging Bitcoin's
monetization there. But that's from the Fiat Lenders point of view.
It's not from the borrower's point of view.
So the borrower is necessarily the Bitcoin holder.
And so the question there, if you're assuming as a starting point,
that your opportunity cost is just holding Bitcoin, right?
Or like your default investment position or whatever is just holding Bitcoin.
What are you doing with this incremental fiat that beats that return?
I don't think there's a single answer to that.
That's a good point.
It could be completely personal, in which case it doesn't really come into a risk calculation.
It's just like you want to, you know,
You don't want to sell.
Buy a house.
You don't want to sell.
You want to avoid capital gains tax.
Like this stuff doesn't come into some like investment calculation necessarily.
If it does, I mean, I guess you could do it.
I've heard of this happening where, you know, you do it in order to effectively leverage
your own position, but where you're far more comfortable with where the leverage is coming from.
So as in you borrow against Bitcoin and then you buy more Bitcoin and you do that when
you think the market's at a bottom.
And then when it goes up, you just round out your loan and that you end up with more.
But it's kind of, it's only interesting in terms of the.
mechanics, like economically, you're just levered long Bitcoin, which I don't find that interesting,
frankly. And I also don't think that's really what Sailor means either. The final thing I want to
touch on, which is, is relevant to both these points, is actually being more specific about what
you even mean by risk-free, because it's not really risk-free. It's sort of, the risk is reduced
if you understand it, but there's all, like, this isn't, just for the, for the audience's
context, we're kind of assuming a lot of context here, but there's no. There's no.
way of doing this where it's entirely, say, within a smart contract, whatever that even means,
but just like people might have that image from, you know, Ethereum, for example, right?
There's no way of doing that in Bitcoin.
You can rely on all kinds of interesting scripting, well, not even basically just multi-saint, right?
You can rely on multi-sake to reduce the centralization risk of this, but you can never do it
in such a way that it is literally riskless in terms of, you know, who has custody of the
Bitcoin.
you're always signing up to counterparty risk that the Bitcoin will be rugged, which is, as far as I can tell, unless we had something like, and just be clear, I don't want to opine on this. I'm just kind of throwing it out there. Unless we had something like, you know, some ZK roll-up ecosystem with native stable coins. And you'd also need, like, they need to be somehow algorithmic. Like, they couldn't just be issued by they couldn't be basically a bank. And I'm not sure if that's even possible. I think it probably isn't. In that environment, maybe you could construct.
this in such a way that you can actually fully audit the technical risk of the custody.
But for now, no such thing exists.
It probably won't ever exist.
And so you're basically trusting, you know, it's reduced from like, oh, you're trusting
JP Morgan and you're trusting the US legal system or whatever, but you are still trusting
something.
And that's completely unavoidable.
This is the thing I think people really need to understand.
That's unavoidable because fiat itself can't be trustless, right?
There's no such thing as self-custodying fiat.
And so if you want to enter into a trade where you're reducing the counterparties risk
by letting them, at least in terms of how the contract is structured, be able to liquidate
your Bitcoin and make whole, you have to give up custody.
It's just not possible not to do that.
Or if you came up with such a way, no one would enter into the trade with you.
So that's another point worth thinking about here.
Basically, in summary, this is all very nuanced and probably none of it's that good an idea,
At least for investment purposes.
I think there's lots of interesting ways you can drive this for like, you know, we mentioned
personal circumstances.
I'd say business circumstances as well.
I think that will become more of a thing.
Maybe that we can go into that if you're interested, but not purely for the sake of like
maximizing risk-adjusted returns.
Yes.
Yes.
I think that last point is vital.
Explain in more detail what you mean by this because I totally agree with you, Al.
Well, I think it goes back to the point I made a few minutes ago about how.
If you do put this solely in an investment context, right, you assume there's no personal considerations, no broader commercial considerations. It's just like, how do I grow my stack, basically? This is just a convoluted way of going levered long Bitcoin, which, you know, may or may not be a good, I mean, it's a good idea if it works and it's a bad idea if it doesn't work. But all, even that just reduces to like, can you time the market, right? Maybe some people can. I can't. I can't. Well, not only I can't because I don't believe anybody can. Can.
I don't really have much more to say on that is, I think it's just gambling, right?
It's like if you win at gambling, obviously you feel really smart, but then you lose and
you feel really stupid.
And this is kind of, for me, removed from any worthwhile investment or business analysis.
But the more interesting angle, I think is, you know, as a, I'll maybe say it in the business
context, because I think it's more interesting.
And I think it's going to become significantly more common as well, that businesses
reorient their corporate goal, I guess, to being over the long term acquire as much
Bitcoin as possible, but they could still end up in a situation where because they have a whole bunch
of Bitcoin, but they also have shorter term, like significantly shorter term dollar costs or
liabilities, however this need for capital might arise. And they may think that the lowest cost
of capital way of meeting this is borrowing against their Bitcoin, as opposed to, say, selling their
Bitcoin, so they immediately have less, or selling some other asset that they own, but they
that impairs their ability to generate a return so as to then buy Bitcoin.
Like this, I basically think that this will become a corporate finance tool,
provided the business in question is, well, two things, I suppose,
provided they have a lot of Bitcoin, that's obvious, because you need that to do it.
But probably the philosophy behind that is more important that they actually conceive of their
primary responsibility being to accumulate Bitcoin.
And they're obviously related, right?
Because why would you end up with so much Bitcoin in the first place if you didn't think roughly that?
You probably would just sell it or distribute it or whatever.
But that, I think, is a more interesting thing that I can see this becoming more and more common
as something the businesses or management teams say actually articulate as the purpose of how
their, or purposes in quite the right word.
Yeah, philosophy, I guess, the philosophy of how they are running the business in the
interests of shareholders and therefore borrowing against the stack to cover whatever
pops up as a corporate finance tool.
I think that'll become a lot more common too.
Yeah, like working capital concerns.
So if you have an expense you weren't expecting and you know you can pay that off in one or two months,
then you're going to borrow against it because of the ease and how quickly you can come up with the cash.
And then once you make the cash flow back in the coming quarter, you just pay back the loan as quickly as you can.
It's basically because you don't have to go deal with bankers or anything.
You can basically get access to the cash immediately because it's over collateralized using Bitcoin.
Okay.
When we look at micro strategy, we look at how much Bitcoin they're safe.
sitting on and you're looking and you're hearing Michael say these things. Do you think that they're going to start doing crafty things with their Bitcoin? Or you think they're just going to continue to?
Maybe. I like honestly, I don't know frankly even that much about my criss strategy. I mean, to the extent that like everybody on Bitcoin Twitter can't help but know something about it. My impression of what he's done though is basically, this isn't original in any way. I think it's just like a clean way of looking at it is he's arbitraising.
the preferential access to like bullshit fiat finance that microsat strategy gets by virtue of being
listed in the US.
Public markets.
The first and probably so far, the only, at least at any meaningful scale, CEO and therefore
company to have really exploited this.
That also, I think, will become super common.
I think if anything, I'd be interested in your take on this too, that I'm surprised he's
still the only one because they started doing this.
It feels like a long time ago now.
Like I want to say four years ago, maybe more.
No one's really copied them at massive scale.
We have these, what you have what was like metap planet and then was it similar scientific,
I think, but these are like tiny, tiny companies.
It'll be interesting when people do finally start to follow this.
Yeah, it's kind of disappointing.
It hasn't happened yet, but I don't know.
What do you make of that?
I think it speaks more to like how there's just no governance where any founder still has control
of the company.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think it speaks to how the too big to fail banks are basically the ones with all the
voting rights for all public equity in the world.
Maybe, yeah.
Right?
I mean, it's all everything's in.
Pretty much that.
Yeah.
So, well, okay, let's start a thing about it more positively then.
Who would be the next to do it?
Like, what's your prediction?
I mean, a couple things have to line up.
You have to have a founder that has a controlling share or a very close to
controlling share of the voting rights and has a lot of influence on the board because they
have so many voting rights.
Yeah.
And then two, they have to be, I think one of the challenges you get with some of the large tech companies and why they're not, at least putting some of it on their balance sheet is just because they're in growth mode, right?
Like, micro strategy was very stagnant. Their revenue isn't changing. He was kind of desperate to find something to preserve or help him grow despite not being able to do it operationally. And so that was a fit. And then you just have to have somebody who is over the top.
smart to like dig into all the nuance and understand Bitcoin in addition to running their operational
business that's at the helm and can make these decisions. And so I think when we look at like all
these things that kind of lined up with micro strategy, it's really obvious that he's doing it.
But it's also a little obvious as to why it's so hard for everybody else to do it. And they don't
have all these things. I think if we could peer into private markets and see like smaller
companies where you have founders that are still controlling their equity, I'd
bet you would see this being put on with a lot more vigor than what you do in the public
markets. Well, what's funny about that, though, is that everyone who is doing it is very
strongly incentivized to hide the fact that they're doing. Yeah, that too. That too. It's only,
it's only because micro strategy is public. Well, I don't know. Sailor seems to enjoy. Well,
you know something that I really think of this, but like, regardless of his individual motivations,
Microsoft actually has to admit they're doing this. Yeah. But private companies don't. And it's, yeah,
it's better for that, not that any individual private company is like going to move the price
with this news, but obviously at the margin, it's just always in their interest to stack
stats at the lowest possible price. So why would they ever tell anyone? Yeah. I think what we're
going to see as this rolls into this next four years, I think what we're going to see is way
more companies that are going to do it, not as demonstratively as micro-stratory. I mean, that's, it's over
the top what he's doing. I think what you're going to see is companies are like, yeah, we're going to
take a 5% Bitcoin position instead of these other marketable securities that we put on our balance
sheet. And we're going to do it through iBit. In fact, you saw Goldman do this.
They're not just... Okay, this is super interesting though, right? So if they do it through I bet,
they can't do what we talked about a few minutes ago. They can't borrow against it. They can't
do any kind of funky corporate finance, which you would think they would... I mean, maybe they haven't
they just don't know about that yet. Like, they haven't thought it through that much yet.
Yeah. That's also, in my opinion, actually, that's a good reason to be bearish from the ETFs. And
like the super, super long run that, you know, once it becomes normalized enough, people are like,
wait a minute, I don't want an IOU.
I want an actual Bitcoin.
Alan, don't you think that they could take their iBit shares and post them as collateral
and borrow against that?
I mean, I would assume, especially could have a lot.
It wouldn't be as efficient, though, I don't think.
Yeah.
Because I see, this is just sorry, we're jumping around quite a bit here, but the reason
I was so excited about the topic we were on previously is that I'm very bullish on that
becoming a legitimately massive market.
Like that will become something that's just.
globally liquid. I mean, you even alluded to this yourself, right? That it's the way the logic
would work at a certain point of this market having grown and it being sufficiently deep and
liquid and so on is that part of the rationale for choosing to do it as a tool of corporate finance
is how easy it is, right? It's like you can just do it directly. You don't even need to go to a bank.
Whereas I think maybe that's an interesting like milestone to keep in mind. At what point is it
just demonstrably cheaper to borrow against Bitcoin to do this trait, basically, right? To
execute this over collateralized, you know, working capital relief or however it ends up being
characterized with actual Bitcoin versus having an ETF on your balance sheet. That's,
it's going to be 10, 20 years away before anyone thinks about this, but it's fun. Yeah. So a huge
part of all of this is just stable coins at large. In general, I'm not going to say anything
more about stable coins. I just want to hear if you had to sit down in a room and people are like,
Alan, teach us about stable coins. Like stable coins 101. What?
are your opinions on the proliferation? Like, where's this all going? Sure, yeah. I mean,
I'm certainly not an expert on this. I'm not going to put myself forward as like, oh,
everyone should come and listen to my stable coin thesis. There are other people I would go to,
like if I wanted to learn more about this. And actually, I'm pretty sure this feels like it was
very recent that Nick and Castle Island pretty mammat. It's one of these things where like,
I have the PDF. I haven't read it. I haven't had time to read it because it's so long. So maybe
point people to that if they do want a more in-depth review. And I'm pretty sure, I remember clearly,
I think he's had a hand in writing that. I reached out to Nick. He didn't respond. I would love to cover
it. I would love to have him on the show to do it. I'll, I'll pest room for you. I'll be like,
come and press on the stable coins. So my, yeah, so with all that said, my take is probably more,
I mean, this is very in keeping with my personality anyway, but it's far more philosophical.
It's that, like, I don't really know what's actually happening, but I can opine on it anyway. So I'll start
off with like the meanest, probably also funniest thing that I have thought historically about
stablecoins, which is that on the one hand, they're clearly basically the only real product
market fit in crypto outside of Bitcoin in the sense of there's real world usage. I think that's
actually necessary for like market fit as opposed to just prices bouncing all over the place and,
you know, quasi-bankers and head funds taking a cut of the flow, but it's just all going in a circle
and ultimately, you know, retail users are being scammed.
I think like that thesis is strongly well understood.
It doesn't need, you know, you and I and whoever else on Bitcoin Twitter harping on about it.
But stable coins have worked, right?
There's like, off the top of my head, I don't know, I think over $100 billion worth
of issued stable coins and that, and I did hear this.
I maybe heard it because the NIC's report, but I'm pretty sure that Tether on Tron,
which obviously isn't even all of Tether.
Tether on Tron does more volume in like a dollar.
denominated, not individual transactions, does more volume than Visa. I'm pretty sure that that's
true. Sorry if that's just fatal, but I'm pretty sure that's true. So, like, obviously people use
this and it kind of works. So that mean snide bit part one is this is the only good thing to have
actually come out of crypto. Yeah. But then even meaner and more snide is that when you think
through the mechanics of it, it doesn't need a blockchain. Like, this is where I get really
confused, but it's worked with quote unquote
blockchains because
I guess basically
regulators are just confused by all the buzzwords
and all the hype and they could
just shut it all down tomorrow but they don't
I think for that reason I'm not entirely sure
but that's why for me it's so funny that like how
overrepresented Tron is with this and seemingly
not in any other thing within
crypto that people seem to care about. It's far more Ethereum and Solana-centric because Tron is
like not really pretending not to be a database. It's basically it's just a database in a way that
Solana is like, they kind of pretend, but it's a bit more obvious. And then the Ethereum people
are like really religious about, no, this is the future of decentralized computation. Whereas
John's just like now, we're basically just database. But that's kind of the crux of it that you don't,
like what you need for this is a database. You can do this even more cheaply than.
and on a blockchain.
Yeah.
This is an important point because the technical people that I talk to tell me,
because my question is,
is, okay, you got billions and billions of dollars that are issued on top of this protocol,
call it Solana or Tron.
What happens if, say, Tether or Circle has to, for whatever reason,
port these coins over to another protocol or their own protocol or whatever?
Is there any type of concerns with their ability to do this?
if, say, Solana just blew up or whatever, right?
Technically blew up.
And the answer I get-
No.
That's the answer I get back, which kind of blows.
There is no concern.
Digging into this is the interesting part, right?
That Salana or Toronto, whatever it is,
is basically just like rails for this.
The actual value of the asset that you allegedly own is tethers goodwill.
Basically, it's like tethers, the full faith and credit.
credit of tether. And so, I mean, Tether's, I'm not saying this to not Tether. Like, Tether's
clearly an amazing business model, but it's basically just, it's like a full reserve bank. It's
actually, you mentioned before, you mentioned Kayla Long before. Be interested in what, like,
really probing her and this and kind of winding her up, because I'm sure she's furious about this
in private. It's just, it's custodia, but like offshore. It's like a Eurodollar.
Yes. Yes. It's fascinating. I had this mastermind discussion with Joe Carlosari,
American Hoddle, and Jeff Ross. And this is exactly what we were talking about.
talking about is it's interesting that Caitlin is playing by the rules. She just went and knocked
right on the front door of the Federal Reserve and said, here's all of the paperwork, here's
everything. And they're basically like, no, out here you have Circle and Tether doing exactly
what she's trying to do, which is a fully reserved bank. And it's fascinating to me that they're
kind of not, I hate to say this, that not playing by the rules. I think they're playing by
whatever rules don't exist.
Yeah.
Maybe the best way to describe it.
I mean,
I don't think it's,
this is one of the things about,
you know,
dealing with these kind of people.
It's,
to be clear,
I don't have any experience of this.
So this is basically just me like living vicariously
through whatever Kailen puts on here on Twitter or whatever.
It seems very Afka-esque in the sense that it's not a conspiracy.
It's just like bewildering,
nightmarish incompetence, right?
There's no secret memo that's gone out.
being like, at all costs, stop Kalyn Long. It's just like no one within this system can actually
do anything useful. So, you know, here we are. Tether's $100 billion and custodias, whatever they
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All right.
Back to the show.
Do you think that the big banks are looking at tether and saying that's the game we want
to play in?
We have to be able to start participate in this.
And is this why the SAB 121 thing has become such a big deal for the banks?
I really don't know because I mean, I don't have any experience like within the
politics of running a bank or even working within a big, like I've never done that.
And again, my insights on this are just derived primarily from posting on Twitter.
I can certainly imagine them being envious of the, basically the business model that
has kind of wriggled itself into, which is basically just, because it's an interesting
tradeoff, right, between the big banks are not fully reserved, right?
But gigantically fractionally reserved and they can't ever go bust anyway.
So it doesn't really matter.
So, like, they have their own weird arbitrage of fiat.
That's kind of the, almost the essence of fiat, right?
It's how they work.
But in particular, in a high rate environment, which is high, okay, high relative to what,
but like relative to the past 10 years, let's say the past maybe two years has seemed high rate,
Tether suddenly looks genius because they're pretty much just printing money to the extent,
but this is where it gets kind of weird again, to the extent the U.S. government lets them.
enables this to continue.
And it seems like, let's go down that path because to me it kind of seems like the
U.S. government is like, man, we really don't like what they're doing, but we kind of need
them to do what they're doing.
And it's almost like they have this recognition that when we look at the trend of buyer
for treasuries, like they're the rocket ship on the trip.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
That's pretty easy to glean in that the role.
it seems obvious to me at least why tether is tolerated, which is that it's, I don't think it makes
the most sense to see tether even as like, to me, tether's an intermediary, basically, right? Tether's
like effectively an outsource, like an unofficial broker of treasuries that is sucking up dollar
demand that wouldn't otherwise exist at all because it's basically just dollarizing emerging
market on behalf of the treasury. And so it's, yeah, even that is like, I guess, the more you think
about this, the more weird and incestuous and I think just to come back full circle, like,
quite uncomfortable in terms of how much exposure to this you want. Because basically, the more
you think about it, the more you realize it's completely political. Like, there's very little
economic or technical rationale here. So, like, economically, does anything we've just said really
make, I mean, the dollarization component, maybe, yeah, like, you can see why this stuff is
popular. But even that, like, it's so wrapped up in politics that, I would say the politics takes
precedence. And then technically it's just a joke. We covered that already. It may as well just be a
database. So I don't know. I think that's the wildest part is like you get caught up in so much
technical jargon and term terminology. Just one thing there, like I do want to mention this before
moving on because I don't want to be quoted out of context on this, that even though I'm
claiming this is stupid and pointless, it's still better than real fiat. That's what I think
ties it all together. So there is some technical merit, if you want to think of it that way.
But all, and this is I think is the gist of the product market fit, right? When I'm saying it's like
dollarizing emerging markets for literally all of those people, for like, again, it's kind of
political, but it's sort of for technical reasons as well. They can access, I mean, they can access
cash, right? But that's like not super useful if you're not in the US. So it's basically for technical
reasons. And even in like a Fiat context, it's weird what that even means. But these,
These are technically superior dollars for almost everyone who uses them than dollars in a bank
account with a regulated US bank.
So it does have that going for it.
But all that really tells you is that fiat itself is even dumber than this, not that this
is all that smart.
And the reason you're saying that it's better, because I think that you'd have people
argue that.
The reason you're saying it's better is because number one, it's saleable.
Number two, it's most likely fully backed.
Whereas if you put your money in a bank account, let's say you put $500,000 in a bank account,
you might only get half of that back if the bank would go bankrupt.
Exactly.
Yeah.
If they don't bail them out.
I think the only way you could like honestly at all possibly disagree with that assessment
is if you're basically like conspiratorial on tether.
Like I can see there being a kind of unknowable risk trade off or unknowable from the outside,
let's say it.
And the person making this criticism has some inside knowledge of this.
But from the outside, unknowable risk trade-off of, oh, well, how, you know, they say they're backed.
It doesn't even need to be as much as like, oh, Tether's lying about the reserves or whatever.
It's like, it can be even more conspiratorial in a way.
It's like, no, they have the reserve, but they're just going to be turned off.
Like, they're going to be shut down tomorrow and you're going to get nothing versus, you know, being more confident in like the U.S., like the FDIC, basically, like what you'll end up getting back from them.
I think that's the only dimension on which you, not even that I would, but that one could
prefer dollars in a US bank account, like that form of having dollars.
And basically any other way you would actually want to use dollars, Tether-on-Tron,
even for the life of the same argument, Tether-on-Tron is superior.
It's far, as you say, it's far more saleable.
It's far easier to send it, which is basically the only thing you either send money or you
don't send it, right?
So if you're, and actually, that's a really good way of framing it, right?
If you're going to not send it, then you want tether because it's fully backed.
If you're going to send it, you want tron because you just do it right away.
Like you don't need to deal with US banking rail.
So on both, both the properties of money that you would want the most.
I can't believe I'm, we spent so long with me, just shilling crypto and stable coins.
But at this point, I think is worthwhile because if you want to be, this is something I've seen, I've spent years actually see it.
Bitcoiners kind of tie themselves in knots trying to explain this away, like as if this isn't real.
And unfortunately, it is real.
But I think the way that I, like my personal brand of cope is that it's not a reflection
of like Bitcoin having failed or failed, even failed to achieve something yet.
It's just a completely different use case that is frankly better than fiat because legacy fiat
sucks so much that this can't help but be better.
So, you know, we do have to acknowledge that.
I would even go a step further in saying that this is a necessity for Bitcoin to become what it's going to become.
And here's why I say that.
So when we look at, let's just say there's a million monetary units in the world and we need it to be 10 million against Bitcoin that is fixed and never to be changed at 21 million.
People are saying, well, how in the world does Bitcoin get to a price of a million or five million or these crazy numbers that everybody keeps throwing, and I'm using crazy here in air quotes, these crazy numbers that people keep talking about.
Well, you have to expand, aggressively expand the number of Fiat monetary units in the system.
How are you going to do that? How are you going to push dollars in euros and every other Fiat
into the nooks and crannies of society in order to expand the monetary units at this pace
that we all think that they need to end and it's all caught up in the amount of debt that they're
that they keep? How do they monetize all that? I personally think that all these stable coins
are a function of how the governments are just trying to get more and more dollars into the system.
And it's the mechanics of it. So you know, you have these people saying, oh, my God, tether's getting so big. There's no need for Bitcoin. And I'm saying, no, this thing's going to smother it. The Fiat system is going to smother itself through indulgence of expansion at levels that we can't even comprehend. Well, how in the world do you think that's going to happen? I think it's going to happen a significant amount of it's going to happen through stable coins.
So I don't see it as.
Yeah, I think you're probably right.
I think I guess so far, I don't have any of the relevant numbers off the top of my head,
but probably to date, the impact probably been negligible, but that it's clearly growing exponentially.
And we sort of covered this already, right?
For the purposes of making this point, the easiest way to think of tether is as an unofficial
broker of treasuries.
Yeah.
Funnaling demand to the treasury that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Like, that can't help but make inflation at least of the dollar worse, which is good for
Bitcoin. So sure. I'm aboard with that. I want to talk about other supporting technologies,
freedom technologies, specifically. No. That was good. See, he is the funniest guy on Twitter.
I promise you. Now, I'm talking more about Noster. And yeah, I'm kind of curious to get your
opinion because you're just so thoughtful on all things tech and kind of the direction everything's
going. Do you see Noster and maybe you're seeing
some other things that you think are important, being reinforcing and additive to Bitcoin's
reach in the coming 10 years? Or do you think that this is something that's kind of off on its own?
Yeah, that's a really interesting way of putting that. I don't have a super strong view
on the basis that I don't want to get too excited too early. Like the main thing I tend to think
about Noster is just appreciating how early it still is really. And I guess pushing that a bit
further, I'm not sure we really know what Nostr is for yet.
Like there's a lot of, this may be past now that I'd say a year ago or so, there was a lot
of back and forth about basically Noster being like better than Twitter.
Clearly not in some ways, but potentially yes in other ways.
And that sets up a really kind of straightforward, almost binary debate about whether you prefer
Noster or Twitter.
And it's an easy stick to beat Noster with because there's clearly ways in which it sucks
compared to Twitter or compared to any kind of social media.
I think that was probably, I don't mean, I'm not trying to come across as like judgmental
of the way people had the conversation or anything.
I think it probably was helpful in terms of generating interests and like sucking a lot of
people in.
I think the first way that almost everyone at least so far has used Noster is trialing it as a
Twitter alternative and then, you know, realizing some of the ways that it is cool and
it is potentially better than Twitter in the long run.
I'm just honestly not sure that that's even that interesting a use case for it.
I kind of feel like it'll end up becoming one of many.
I think the far bigger picture view of like what is the primitive that we get here,
that's a lot more interesting than like, oh, you know, Twitter's just censoring all my friends or whatever.
The relationship to, and I just finish that point, I think that primitive is probably best thought of as something
like standalone identities.
So like identities that aren't attached to any given service,
but that you can port into any like app, say,
I don't know, maybe the best way of putting app platform, whatever,
that decides to turn on, oh yeah, we'll accept people using their nostril profile
with us.
And then if anything, we don't, I think that's the,
maybe not even that long term, but like medium term vision for accelerated adoption
is various, you know,
consumer-facing apps, platforms, whatever, realizing it's actually cheaper for us if we don't
need to support, you know, you don't need to have an infrastructure for like managing user
accounts because we just outsource that to Noster. That would be, I think we're probably a long
way away from that being anyway normalized, but that would be a very, very good sign. The link to
Bitcoin, I think is pretty tenuous, to be honest. I'm totally open to like a bulky,
here. But I think it goes far more in the other direction. I think it's that Bitcoin is significantly
more important to Nostra. Let's say than Nostra is to big. I mean, even that's probably pretty,
I don't think that's controversial. That's obvious on the face of it. But I maybe just push a bit
further just on the Noster side in that I basically don't think Noster's possible without Bitcoin,
at least not in the long run. I think it's because of the micropayment. It's close.
Because of the micropayments? Not even really micropayments. No, it's more. Let me just
finish that point and then I'll go straight to answering this. So I think that it's not just that,
you know, it was invented by Bitcoiners and not even just that a lot of the use so far is
kind of commingled with Bitcoin use cases and that back to the point about it, we don't even
really know what it's for necessarily. A lot of the emerging non-social media use cases are
finding ways to plug it into making various ways of using Bitcoin better. So there is all of that.
But I think that's kind of coincidental to the real point, or my real.
point at least about the very long term for Noster, which is that in order to live up to any of
these hopes, no matter how you want to categorize it, but if you want to be as bullish as possible,
probably something like, you know, uncensurable free speech on the internet, whatever,
in order for that to be viable in the long run, in order for basically just kind of like
mimicking the sort of discussions that we're all used to having had about Bitcoin, like,
in the worst possible case of everybody trying to shut this down and being violent and so,
on, like, how does it hold up? I think for Noster, wherever to get to that point, you need the
payments to be as censorship resistant as the speech that the infrastructure is supporting
and trying to also make censorship resistant. I think basically untangle that a little bit.
If you had everything, basically, here's a good, right, if you had Noster, but you didn't have
Bitcoin. Eventually, if it really succeeds, it obviously pisses people off because people want to
censor things, right? They don't want this like unsensurable free speech, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
It's probably, I think, very easy to stifle its use on the basis that all of the infrastructure
still has a cost to run. And if you can choke off the Fiat payments that support that,
then you can choke off all of the tech infrastructure that's built on top of them. So it's not,
this isn't even really a technical point. It's not like, oh, I expect the protocols to become
internet. Like, I don't even know what that means, but I'm sure somebody, people have said that
at some point, like a tighter technical integration between the protocols. That I'm not the right
person to speak on whether that even makes any sense or whether there's anything to expect there.
What I do think is super relevant is more, I guess you could say it's political. It's almost,
I think it's kind of deeper than that. It's like as paranoid as you can possibly be how,
how resistant is this to physical violence, right? Which is like everyone's used to having gone
through that thought process with Bitcoin. I think it's as essential here. But it relies on
Bitcoin. In a way, the Bitcoin doesn't really rely on anything else because itself is money.
Hopefully that made some sense. No, I think that that's a really incredible point with respect at all.
Okay, last question that I have for you, we're going to choose your own adventure.
Would you like to talk about the 50% cut, or the 50 basis point cut that just recently
was announced and what that means for global liquidity? Or would you like to talk about
BNY Mellon getting approved by the SEC and also for custodial service?
and also for that second question, that plus the derivatives that just got approved for Ibit.
Which of those would you rather talk about?
I think probably the second one on the basis that the first one, I kind of don't care about.
Like the extent to which I have indulged thinking about this was seeing it and then tweeting,
breaking new price of everything just dropped and then just moving on with my day.
So I really don't think I have anything to say beyond that.
The second way, I actually didn't know most of what you said in the second point. So if you first
explain it to me as well as the audience, I would be interested in diving into that.
Yeah. So the SEC has green lighted BNY Mellon to now provide custodial services for, you know,
if you want to put Bitcoin and deposit. So now it's not just Coinbase that's in the game. Now
you got a traditional bank that's in the game. And then you also had the SEC approve derivatives on top
of Ibit. So if you want to do, if you want to trade options now on top of Ibit, that's getting
Sorry, what exactly does on top of iBit mean?
Well, I mean, to date, all you can do with Ibit is you can buy it and hold it.
But now I guess you can do options on top of it.
If you want to buy a call on Ibit, you can, this hasn't officially launched.
But it is specifically a call on the ETF.
On the ETF, yes, sir.
Right, not on.
Okay.
Yes, sir.
I like how you, you didn't even know the question, but that was the one you preferred over the 50.
It tells me how much you dislike the 50 basis point out.
You know why? I think because it's actually news.
Like, this is interesting new information to me, whereas, oh, the Fed did a thing.
That's like great.
This is why I love you, Alan.
Oh, my.
Any thoughts on it?
And if not, that's really cool.
I think I probably need a bit more time to think about the derivatives point.
It's not immediately obvious to me what the implications of that are.
BNY Mellon, I think is huge.
I'm surprised I haven't heard that.
Maybe I just haven't paid enough attention on Twitter lately.
It's huge on the basis that, again, I don't, like, I'm not, you know, within the halls of power, I guess that would give me direct access to the people who are having these thoughts. So it's more like, again, I can imagine this being true that this relieves a lot of anxiety around needing to associate with Coinbase. I agree. I think that's probably the best thing that will come from this. Yeah, I agree. Now, what they'll probably end up doing is outsourcing the custody to Coinbase.
Yeah, probably.
Yeah, they're just white labeling Coinbase.
Oh, boy.
Alan, it is always a pleasure.
If people want to learn more about you,
give them a handoff where they can learn more.
I just swear, I think is F-L-E-N-F-3-2.
I don't think if anything else is even,
not because I put everything there anyway,
so that's a good start.
Do you want me to read my N-Pub as well?
No, we will have his N-O-Ster link there on primal.
I should memorize it one of these days.
You would do something like that.
And we will also have his tattoo it here and I can just like hold it up to the cat.
And we'll have his Twitter in the show notes.
So folks, check that out.
The very thoughtful, Alan Farrington, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for listening to TIP.
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